Symposia
Racial Trauma
Erika Roach, M.A.
PhD Student
University of California at Berkeley
Albany, California
The deleterious health effects of adverse childhood experiences are well-documented. Youth of color are at especially heightened risk for stress and trauma exposure as well as exposure to race-related stress and trauma (RST). The Race-Based Traumatic Stress model theorizes that racist incidents prompt stress responses and are linked to emotional symptoms and psychological dysfunction. It calls for greater specificity in identifying the psychological impact of RST to maximize the practical applications of this knowledge and render findings more actionable. The present systematic review examines the role of emotion dysregulation, specifically, as a mediator of RST and health outcomes in youth of color ages 5-24. Across all 29 empirical studies that met inclusion criteria, greater RSTs were associated with higher levels of emotion dysregulation, which in turn were associated with more negative health and wellbeing outcomes including increases in substance use, rule-breaking behavior, smoking, depressive symptoms, anxiety, somatic symptoms, and internalizing/externalizing symptoms. These findings suggest that clinicians should incorporate the complex association between RST and emotion dysregulation in case conceptualizations and treatment plans for this population.